The child was not in the cupboard when she went to look for him there. Maud stood, with a thundering heart, in the doorway, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness.
The first thing she saw was the tall, tidy pile of empty canvas sacks, each one about a foot square, which occupied the corner opposite where she stood. She knew they were empty.
Then she saw that the shelves lining the walls were covered with shoe-boxes… objects that had never before filled this space. All the labels on all the shelves had been removed. She noticed, however, that they, too, were piled neatly on the near end of a middle shelf, very close to where her hands now rested.
The child, she supposed, had rescued the boxes from the back of the store two doors down, and kept them hidden. Kept them hidden until the hour arose when he felt the need of them.
Now that her eyes had focused, she began to inspect the contents of these boxes. One held tie-pins, another held buttons. She knew these items. She had recorded them. Another held rings, another was full of watches. A box at the end, larger than the rest, was filled to capacity with teeth, false and otherwise. The light that moved into the cupboard from the hall glittered on gold fillings. There was another box for brooches and still another for hairpins. Maud had not noticed until then how spider-like they were, lying piled together with their legs entangled.
She now saw that the tickets in the sunroom were merely a clue; a fragment of the great number of tickets which were packed together on a bottom shelf in their own special box. They were of such a variety that they might have been able to tell someone other than Maud a great deal about the personality of their owner. Some were mangled, some were folded, some looked as though they had never been touched, some were soiled from incessant handling. Some looked bleached by exposure to water, others appeared to have miraculously avoided any contact with the water at all.
All hope of redistributing this incredible classification process lost, Maud sat on a low stool in the twilight of the closet and considered the possessions of drowned men; how they always carried similar objects in their pockets. Yet, it was the crack in the cuff-link that would allow some relative to identify a body the earth had already, mercifully, taken care of. But rarely did that relative appear. These wild, violent deaths were too grotesque, Maud imagined, to be faced. How were they explained in distant parlours? There were, of course, recipes for disappearance: he went out to buy a newspaper and never returned, he vanished in a snowstorm, he was stolen by gypsies, captured by the fairies, enchanted by a wood nymph on the eve of his marriage.
Maud picked a shoe-box arbitrarily from a shelf directly in front of her. It was filled with pill boxes – round, square, octagonal, rectangular, silver, gold, tin, monogrammed, painted, rusted. She opened one of them. Two round pink tablets looked up at her like a pair of small enchanted eyes… like the eyes of a tiny demon.
She leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Thousands of small objects floated across her mind, sometimes in conjunction with the words she had written describing them. Some lovely cameos from the necks of young, drowned, probably pregnant girls… a variety of timepieces, shoelaces, earrings. Once she had found a bird’s nest in a woman’s apron pocket. Where, she wondered was that now? How had the child classified it? Surely there was never more than one. She had found books too. Oddly enough, when they weren’t guide books they were mostly poetry or prayers. Small books that fit neatly into the breast pocket of a jacket.
Then there were the items the river itself placed in pockets, the river and the rapids; a variety of stones, sticks, sometimes even small fish. One man carried a dead mouse in his pants’ pocket. Maud could never decide whether he had brought it with him to the river or whether the river had given it to him. There were tin cans and the bones of whistling swans, sometimes feathers, very occasionally a flower.
When she opened her eyes, the child was standing in the doorway gazing at her. Lit from behind, his hair looked like a brilliant halo surrounding his head, and from inside the gloom of the cupboard Maud perceived that he was the possessor of all the light and that it was she, not he, that had been the dark wall. She had never, since her husband’s death, allowed the child access to the other, brighter side of that masonry, she had never allowed him to try to pull it down. Now the child had caused all the objects that surrounded her, all the relics she had catalogued, to lose their dreadful power. He had shown her what they really were: buttons, brooches, tie-clips, garters… merely objects.
“Dreaming,” he said to her.
“Dreaming,” she agreed, rising slowly from the stool.
His hair, when she laid her hands on it, felt warm, soft, alive.